Kenya

• The Cape Escape - Cape Town
• My Mountain High in Cape Town - Cape Town
• The Drop Zone - Cape Town
• On the trail to true adventure - Johannesburg
• The great es-Cape - Cape Town
• Come into the Garden - The Garden Route
• My Zulu Extravaganza - Durban
• Up Close and Personal - South African Safari
• Tracking Big Game - Kruger National Park
• Sleeping with the Lions - South African Safari
• A Safari with real pride - South African Safari
• Where the Lion King comes to Life - South African Safari
• Our guide to the top 10 safaris - South African Safari
• A Roaring Success - Victoria Falls
• Come into the Garden - The Garden Route
• The Worlds Most Beautiful Road? - The Garden Route
• Zipping off to Zanzibar - Zanzibar, Kenya
• Africa's catch of the day - Mozambique
• The Cape escape… and it was right up my Street - Garden Route: South Africa
• The nation kissed by a rainbow - South Africa
• Our wild silver wedding! - Kenya

OUR MARRIAGE WAS A VERY British affair; a flint church in a leafy Oxfordshire market town, toasts and cold ham. Twenty five years later, it is all rather different. For a start, there is a surprise fire-eater and a waiter doing somersaults, not to mention a song composed (or perhaps hastily adapted) in our honour and sung with admirable gusto.

The Barton silver wedding is in full flow on Manda Island, under the glittering Southern Cross constellation, in Kenya.

We had come to east Africa to mark this milestone but also, if truth be told, as a sort of pretend gap fortnight, inspired by our traveller son’s tales.

A Years Worth of Contrasts

We chose Kenya because it promised a year’s worth of contrasts, squeezed into 14 days. And it kept its word.

We saw emerging city life and traditional cultures, fauna, flora, village schools and luxury hotels, exotic coastal towns, mountains and vast plains.

And what we saw, heard, smelt and tasted has stayed with us far beyond anything we ever experienced before.

Until we landed at Jomo Kenyatta international airport, my experience of this continent had been limited to Karen Blixen’s memoir, Out Of Africa and David Attenborough. In Nairobi, I insisted on paying tribute to Karen (immortalised on film by Meryl Streep.) The Blixen bungalow was haunted by the Danish writer’s image – her beautiful face gazing out of photos in every room.

We discovered that Kenya is quietly fostering a new form of tourism – epitomised by Campi Ya Kanzi, an award-winning ‘Eco Warrior’ tented safari lodge in the Chyulu Hills, where the plains are dominated by the twin summits of Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, just 25 miles away.

It is a collection of eight ‘tented cottages’, set in 400 square miles and owned and run by Masai landowners in partnership with Italian conservationist Luca Belpietro and wife Antonella Bonomi. Fifty Masai run the lodge, from management to laundry, and profits go on building schools, clinics and a compensation scheme for farmers who lose cattle to lions.

Hearing a lion grunting near your tent is partly exciting, partly terrifying. Lying in bed encased in a duvet, I held my breath until the lions had chased some poor zebra all round the camp and sloped off.

The Freedom is the Greatest Thrill

I was told the next morning that the silence of the camp means every sound is magnified a thousandfold – and no wild beasts were about to unzip our tent flap.

Our guide, Tobiko, a strapping 21-year-old Moran (Masai warrior) on work experience from his tourism course, wears the traditional scarlet and azure checked Shuka (blanket) and led our treks armed with only his spear and a huge knowledge of local wildlife.

Our group is small and we are alone in the wilderness. We walk paths trodden by animals, admiring giraffes grazing the treetops, zebra, hartebeests and impala.

There are many joys in being at Campi Ya Kanzi – the breathtaking views, wine from Antonella’s vineyard in Italy, the risotto alla milanese cooked on a bush campfire, to name a few – but it’s the freedom that’s the greatest thrill.

Our other safari stop is a contrast. Kichwa Tembo and Bateleur are large, luxury safari lodges on the edge of the Masai Mara, run by one of the continent’s biggest ecotourism companies, Conservation Corporation Africa (CCA).

The lodges provide four poster beds and butler service, but the tourist schillings also help fund community projects. In one we visit, Masai wives have been given bee hives and allotments to give them some economic independence. Masai children at a school further up the escarpment are the first in their family to be formally educated, but are confidently planning careers as doctors, broadcasters and teachers.

They giggle and text on mobile phones like their British counterparts, but the perils they face on the way home from school include prowling wild animals.

We were frankly unprepared for the sheer number of animals to be seen at the Masai Mara. We came within feet of the Big Five – lions, elephants, leopard, Cape buffalo and rhinos, as well as cheetahs, giraffes, hyenas and zebra.

The bravest of the wildebeests tiptoed down to the edge of the River Mara and we held our breath as they sniffed the water and apparently decided against it. They may well have caught the scent of the bodies of their brethren, stored by the crocodiles in a watery pantry, just around the bend.

There was an old people’s home for gentleman buffalo, nicknamed the Retired Generals by park rangers, under a tree at the gate of the camp. And a family of mongoose capered and groomed in front of our tent.

Unforgettable Holiday

Our final destination was the island of Manda, a speck in the Lamu archipelago off the coast of Kenya, where we shook off the dust of our safaris.

Run by the redoubtable Bimbi, a deceptively fragile-looking blonde, it offers 16 cottages, seclusion and fabulous food. It is accessible only by sea and we arrive clutching the sides of a fast boat as the pilot guns it past the mangroves and stately dhows.

One night, we walk to the island’s highest point to look at the stars. We are given Dowas, a lethal cocktail of vodka, honey and lime, and offered low sofas on which to recline and scan the sky. Bimbi points out constellations with the help of a site on her laptop.

The night of our anniversary, we are dining on the beach with new friends when the kitchen staff suddenly erupt out of the building behind us, singing, banging pots and pans and cartwheeling. Great tongues of flames light up the sky when a waiter decides to add fire-eating to his CV.

It is a wonderful finale to an unforgettable holiday. Perhaps another ‘gap year’ fortnight may be on the cards.